The Test Drive: Chhandomay on Sun Product Reviews

At a Glance: Last Week's OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and NetBeans Reviews

OpenSolaris
and ZFS had blogs buzzing last week, starting off with a look at
OpenSolaris
2009.06 from Phoronix’s
Michael Larabel who called
out several feature improvements. Michael highlighted the Image
Packaging
System, ZFS snapshot time-slider and new desktop artwork, as well as
saying the
new “Firefox package is bleeding edge.”

Blogger
Simon shared an
extensive post
about his experiences using Solaris and ZFS on a home fileserver,
concluding
that he “learnt a lot over the last year about ZFS, and using it has
convinced me that I made the right choice in selecting both Solaris
and
ZFS.”

VirtualBox
2.2 continued to garner positive blogger reviews this week, as Brighthub’s
Steve Mallard gave VirtualBox a 5
out
of 5 rating in his review that said installation was
“straightforward and
easy.” Steve also noted that, “VirtualBox has dozens of options and
features
found in virtualization software that cost hundreds of dollars…the
value of
virtualization cannot be stressed enough.”

Blogger Tom Puleo said he was really
happy with VirtualBox, and “when given the chance, will choose it
over
Virtual PC or VMware.” He said he liked VirtualBox because it is “fast”
and
“great for day to day use.”

Blogger Carl reported
that he has experimented with a lot of virtualization software and had
“come to
like VirtualBox best.” After switching his Windows XP virtual machine
from
VMware to VirtualBox, Carl says “I'm not likely to switch back from
VirtualBox
any time soon.”

NetBeans

NetBeans
6.7 was the focus of several positive reviews this week, with Dean at Grails
Blogsaying
that the
6.7 Beta is a great release for the Grails community. Dean noted,
“NetBeans'
support of Grails functionality is nearly on par with that of IntelliJ
8.1.”

The blogger from cld.blog-city.comstated
that the new release of NetBeans has excellent support for PHP, and
highlighted
key aspects such as syntax highlighting, a navigator, and code folding,
as well
as “nice support for PHP debugging.”

Blogger Brian Silberbauer discussed
how when he’s teaching a course on JEE, he begins with NetBeans. He
noted,
“This is a great help to the students as it gives them the overview of
what we
will be working with and shows them how quick and easy it is to create
a JEE application
in NetBeans - It takes the complexity fear out of them (to a certain
extent).”